Barack Obama’s rejection by the nation’s voters on November 4 was beyond even the drubbing George W. Bush took in November of 2006.

Commentator Charles Hurt captured the totality of Obama’s defeat in one sentence: “If President Obama suffered a ‘shellacking’ in the 2010 elections, then what he endured Tuesday night was nothing short of a vicious gangland beat down… the likes of which have rarely been seen before in the history of electoral politics.”

As of this writing, the final numbers haven’t been tallied. But the Republicans clearly have the seats they need to capture the Senate majority with wins in Iowa, Colorado, Montana, South Dakota, North Carolina, Arkansas, and West Virginia.

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Reports of big gains for Republicans go all the way down to the local level. And the recriminations are flying.

The Blame Game

The Washington Post published a piece of exceptional journalism yesterday morning after the election, which gave a detailed two-year blow by blow of Obama’s failures from Senator Reid’s perspective. It makes it clear how complete Obama’s personal failure was: “Obama told his team that his No. 1 political goal was to keep the Senate under Democratic control. ‘He was very focused on that,’ said a senior White House official.”

The Post then recounted in great detail how Obama’s actions were viewed by other Democrats. In the piece, Reid’s Chief of Staff, David Krone, calls Obama’s help mere “lip service.”

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Here’s a direct description from The Post: “This past Sunday, two days before Election Day, Krone sat at a mahogany conference table in the majority leader’s stately suite just off the Senate floor, and shared with Washington Post reporters his notes of White House meetings. Reid’s top aide wanted to show just how difficult he thought it had been to work with the White House.”

In other words… Reid is pissed off, and he wants the world to know it was Obama’s failure (not his own) on election night.

As usual, the arrogant Obama isn’t taking the message from the voters. He plans to press on with his left-of-center agenda – the voters be damned.

Obama’s staff told ABC News: “You can expect the president to set an aggressive and defiant tone tomorrow. You’re not going to see any mea culpas, no big firings, no change in direction… The president is prepared to aggressively pursue his agenda using his power of executive authority, where he can’t work with Congress, and the big one is going to be on immigration reform.”

Further Consequences

A final note: Hillary Clinton is also a big loser in this election. Now that several large states needed to win the presidency have unexpectedly elected Republican governors, things don’t look too promising for her.

Hillary also held 45 events across the country to recruit female voters for candidates. Her events were poorly attended and not well received. Even her husband, Bill Clinton, tried to rescue the Senate race in Arkansas; and the effort ended in disaster.

Not even the Clintons could save the Democrats, as their friend, Senator Mark Pryor, was one of the many people given pink slips on Tuesday night.

This commentary originally appeared at WallStreetDaily.com and is reprinted here with permission.